(Newser)
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A 17th-century shipwreck rebuilt inside a Texas museum will let visitors walk the deck of a frigate whose sinking some 330 years ago explains why no one speaks French in Texas, the AP reports. The doomed La Belle was France's last hope to settle Texas and the American southwest, and explorer Robert La Salle the man hired for the job. In 1685, he arrived with four ships and 300 colonists to settle the mouth of the Mississippi—which he overshot by about 400 miles. One ship was lost to pirates, another sank, and a third went home, the Bullock Museum's curator Jim Bruseth tells the Battalion. The La Belle remained, docked with a new colony at Fort St. Louis on the Texas coast while La Salle searched for the elusive river. The frigate sunk in a storm, the colony crumbled, and La Salle was killed.

Though it failed, Fort St. Louis lured the Spanish, who swiped the region from the French. "History oftentimes turns on seemingly small events," Bruseth tells the AP. La Belle was found in 1995, shipped in pieces to Texas A&M, stored in a freezer, and taken piece by piece to the Austin museum. Archaeologists will now reassemble the frigate inside the museum for visitors, then encase it in glass. "Once we get the framing up it's going to look like a big beached whale, a bone carcass," says one archaeologist. The exhibit also includes the cannons, rifles, building materials, and stored aboard La Belle. (Meanwhile, Canada just found its most wanted shipwreck.)

In this Oct. 22, 2014 photo pieces of the 54-foot oak French frigate La Belle are laid out around a replica of the shipat the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas. Archaeologists are beginning... (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

In this Oct. 22, 2014 photo artifacts from the French frigate La Belle are displayed at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas. Archaeologists are beginning to reassemble the remains... (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Artifacts from the French frigate La Belle are displayed at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Guests walk past a replica of the 54-foot oak French frigate La Belle at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Texas A&M researchers place the fore foot pieces of the keel of the 300-year old ship La Belle beside each other as they prepare the pieces for shipment Thursday, July 17, 2014, in Bryan, Texas. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)

Roman numerals mark a timber from the 54-foot oak French frigate La Belle at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Archaeologists work to reassemble the 54-foot oak French frigate La Belle begins at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

I don't know, we have the San Bois mountains (no trees), the Kibois (Kiamichi Wood), Le Flore county, Joliet, and evidence that La Salle, Jean Baptiste Bénard, Sieur de La Harpe came and saw. Where the French had the most trouble was in the Arbuckles where a fight for magic waters of Sulfur, Ok and the gold created tension between them and the Spaniards. Then later Mexicans came back to retrieve hidden gold coins robbed from the US Army post, Fort Arbuckle. But they didn't get it all so people have spent a long time looking for those civil war era coins. Modern day Latinos come for a new kind of gold coin.